true enough, and that she must give up this strange game of
seducing men into engagements which she now knew she would
never keep. So she jilted the sixth clergyman and went to plant
the cross in darkest Africa; and the last stirring in her of what she
repudiated as sin was a flash of rage when he married the cousin,
through whose wit and worldly wisdom he at last became a
bishop in spite of himself.
The black girl, a fine creature, whose satin skin and shining
muscles made the white missionary folk seem like ashen ghosts by
contrast, was an interesting but unsatisfactory convert; for in-
stead of taking Christianity with sweet docility exactly as it was
administered to her, she met it with unexpected interrogative re-
actions which forced her teacher to improvize doctrinal replies
and invent evidence on the spur of the moment to such an extent
that at last she could not conceal from herself that the life of
Christ, as she narrated it, had accreted so many circumstantial
details and such a body of home-made doctrine that the Evan-
gelists would have been amazed and confounded if they had been
alive to hear it all put forward on their authority. Indeed the
missionary's choice of a specially remote station, which had been
at first an act of devotion, very soon became a necessity, as the
appearance of a rival missionary would have led to the discovery
that though some of the finest plums in the gospel pudding con-
cocted by her had been picked out of the Bible, and the scenery
and dramatis personce borrowed from it, yet the resultant religion
was, in spite of this element of compilation, really a product of
the missionary's own direct inspiration. Only as a solitary pion-
eer missionary could she be her own Church and determine its
canon without fear of being excommunicated as a heretic.
But she was perhaps rash when, having taught the black girl to
read, she gave her a bible on her birthday. For when the black
girl, receiving her teacher's reply very literally, took her knob-
kerry and strode right off into die African forest in search of God,
she took thejjible with her as her guidebook.
The first thing she met was a mamba snake, one of the few
poisonous snakes that will attack mankind if crossed. Now the
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